Related papers: Emergent functional dynamics of link-bots
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
We present experimental results on the single file motion of a group of robots interacting with each other through position sensors. We successfully replicate the fundamental diagram typical of these systems, with a transition from free…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
Robots will become ubiquitously useful only when they can use few attempts to teach themselves to perform different tasks, even with complex bodies and in dynamical environments. Vertebrates, in fact, successfully use trial-and-error to…
Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…
We introduce a novel framework for automatic behavior tree (BT) construction in heterogeneous multi-robot systems, designed to address the challenges of adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. Traditional robots are limited by…
In this paper, we propose a novel type of serial robot with minimal actuation. The robot is a serial rigid structure consisting of multiple links connected by passive joints and of movable actuators. The novelty of this robot is that the…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion…
Highly articulated organisms serve as blueprints for incredibly dexterous mechanisms, but building similarly capable robotic counterparts has been hindered by the difficulties of developing electromechanical actuators with both the high…
Legged locomotion is a challenging task in the field of robotics but a rather simple one in nature. This motivates the use of biological methodologies as solutions to this problem. Central pattern generators are neural networks that are…
Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
Complex motions for robots are frequently generated by switching among a collection of individual movement primitives. We use this approach to formulate robot motion plans as sequences of primitives to be executed one after the other. When…
Self-organization is frequently observed in active collectives, from ant rafts to molecular motor assemblies. General principles describing self-organization away from equilibrium have been challenging to identify. We offer a unifying…
We study the evolution of a random weighted network with complex nonlinear dynamics at each node, whose activity may cease as a result of interactions with other nodes. Starting from a knowledge of the micro-level behaviour at each node, we…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Autonomous robotic boats are expected to perform several tasks: 1) navigate autonomously in water environments, such as the canals of Amsterdam; 2) perform individual task, such as water monitoring, transporting goods and people; 3) latch…
Collective behaviors such as swarming and flocking emerge from simple, decentralized interactions in biological systems. Existing models, such as Vicsek and Cucker-Smale, lack collision avoidance, whereas the Olfati-Saber model imposes…
When modeling complex robot systems such as branched robots, whose kinematic structures are a tree, current techniques often require modeling the whole structure from scratch, even when partial models for the branches are available. This…
Current artificial intelligence systems show near-human-level capabilities when deployed in isolation. Systems of a few collaborating intelligent agents are being engineered to perform tasks collectively. This raises the question of whether…